Development of Section 508–Compliant Document Production Protocols and Websites

Abstract

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended in 1998, requires all federal agencies and recipients of federal funding to provide people with disabilities access to information that is comparable to the access available to others. The Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) in Massachusetts and its staff, Central Transportation Planning Staff (CTPS), are committed to both the letter and the spirit of Section 508. Most MPO information is available to the public in the form of documents. Thus, for CTPS, the key to making MPO information accessible was to make accessible its documents and the website that hosted these documents. This paper discusses how CTPS developed an accessible document-production protocol and an accessible website. The agency's document-production protocol had its basis in the use of document templates, which guaranteed consistency and accessibility. The development of an accessible website began with a review of the applicable standards and guidelines and with a redesign of the hierarchical organization of the site. The agency employed a content management system (CMS) to ameliorate the complexity of site development and maintenance. The use of a CMS greatly simplified the development of an accessible site. The paper also examines the special accessibility challenges, posed by pages with particularly rich, dynamic content (i.e., web applications), and some of the approaches that CTPS used to address them. The paper concludes with a discussion of the methodology used to test and validate the site's accessibility and points out the importance of a site-accessibility evaluation by an independent third party.